


Affabulation

by recrudescence



Category: House M.D.
Genre: F/F, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-09
Updated: 2010-05-09
Packaged: 2017-10-09 09:22:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/85659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recrudescence/pseuds/recrudescence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remy Hadley woke up between blood-drenched sheets and went to fix herself a snack. Her heart slipped free of her chest, catching on splintered shards of sternum, and landed on the floor with a despondent thump.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Affabulation

**Author's Note:**

> Lesbians, zombies, and the end of the world, sort of.

Remy Hadley woke up between blood-drenched sheets and went to fix herself a snack. Her heart slipped free of her chest, catching on splintered shards of sternum, and landed on the floor with a despondent thump.

The pathogen elicited mutations; organs were sentient. That was the poetical way of putting it.

Nerves were always first, deadening any pain. Then the heart would work its way out, straining till connective tissue snapped, breaking through bone to free itself from the chest cavity completely.

Instead of consuming itself, the body was rejecting itself, tearing itself apart in the most literal way possible. The gas had leaked and people weren't people anymore, half-humans who accepted death as a distinct possibility and went about their business. Medical insurance premiums were through the roof.

She had known it was coming. She'd been unable to feel, to smell, to taste, and accepted the inevitable. It wasn't living, since no one could live in this condition. Dead men walking.

Remy didn't tell anyone. She preferred to keep her weaknesses close. Someone was bound to guess before too long anyway. There was no point in wasting any breath, especially since her lungs would go next and she would asphyxiate. Or, if she was lucky, her brain, and she would die unaware of it all, unable to process or comprehend rational thought. Anything was preferable to being sent to the quarantined quadrant of town.

Using a bath towel, she cleaned up,

Chase had gone the most recently, unable to keep down food of any kind, ribs practically jangling with every cough until his stomach clawed its way out of his mouth and he fell back with eyes bloody and bulging in his too-thin face, dancing a quickstep with death and tripping over his own feet. She had been there, working the quarantine ward, because doctors were always the first to die and they had to look out for each other, but there had been nothing anyone could do.

Cameron asked if he had died in pain and Remy hadn't been able to say anything.

An experimental drug gone wrong, pathologists at the Institute for Advanced Study's biology department to blame. No telling how many people had inhaled before it was discovered and traced down to the source.

Americans streamed overseas, seeking asylum where they could or, failing that, simply fleeing westward. Like manifest destiny all over again: running from the diseased, polluted east to wide open spaces and brighter futures. The disease seemed to be airborne entirely, but doctors took no chances and patients sobbed at being treated by hazmat suits instead of human beings.

Antibiotics could combat cutaneous and gastrointestinal effects, but nothing at all seemed to help the horrible results of inhalation. Turning people into the walking dead who didn't require vital organs in order to survive; it made no sense, medically, and that was terrifying.

Foreman, sweating and stretched too thin, had her bringing swabs and syringes for the treatable patients and she was grateful to be carrying out such simple tasks, vital as they were. Maybe she would be able to hold out a little longer. She didn't need a heart in order to move things from point A to point B. No time to diagnose anything else while there was still no telling how many more doctors would drop like flies.

House was holding court with Google and whiteboard markers, seemed fit as a fiddle in the midst of it all, would probably live just to spite them, though sometimes Remy thought that he would gladly have died for something this terrible, just to find out what it was like. Cuddy wasn't even around to snap at him. Taub had resigned: took his wife and ran overseas. Kutner plodded staunchly along, face set and brows low.

Cameron slapped her and Remy felt nothing, had to remember to flinch.

Cameron drew her hand back. Redness there, strips of flesh dangling from her nails. "I knew it," she said flatly. "You shouldn't be here." Her eyes were wet.

Remy kissed her.

Like full-body Novocain, going under in slow motion and never coming back, not feeling anything, no pain and no pleasure. She regretted that a little. Only a little, which meant her mind would be going next, was already going, melting like butter on a scalding-hot bread knife.

By rights, she should be far more repulsed; something told her that was important. She should be terrified, not coolly demure this way. A backhanded blessing; she supposed she was lucky. So many people were hysterical when the second-stage symptoms manifested so brutally, never mind those who panicked during the first-stage nerve loss.

She realized that Cameron was more scared than she was. More scared than sad. It was only natural: she had spent more time with Chase than anyone. If he had breathed in a handful of molecules somewhere, then there was a good chance that she had too. And if her way of coping with that was to reach out for human contact one final, cliché, life-affirming time, Remy had nothing to lose by going along with it. Nothing to lose and precious little to give, humanity included.

_There's been an outbreak_, people heard.

An airborne disease in Mercer County, New Jersey. No telling how far it's spread or whether it's still a threat. No way of knowing till everyone presenting with symptoms either died or recovered. They had gotten it under control, at the lab, dousing the fire and disposing of the elements, but not soon enough. Mingling with the air and infiltrating everywhere, ventilation systems and respiration systems.

People wore masks to filter it out, refused to eat locally produced food, looted pharmacies for anything that might stave off symptoms or engender a smooth and easy death. A multitude of reactions, most of them irrational.

Cree's Disease, that was the name being thrown around, after Benjamin Cree, the scientist who'd spearheaded the research and started it all. Like so many academes on the team, dead in his office before the headlines went public.

Whispers of chemical warfare turned to shouts in record time, though scientists struggled to insist that hadn't been the objective of their research, not at all. Waiting for the bombs to start falling, for America to be taken out preemptively before it could pose a bigger threat.

Remy took it all with a grain of salt. Anything was possible when people's hearts were splitting through their chests. It made her think of Dr. Wilson, turning up for the funerals of two ex-wives, then turning up dead of an overdose in a hotel room across town without so much as a note left behind. House, the infectious disease expert, had been in his element until he found out.

Bodies turning themselves inside out, even if they were put under, doped up on enough morphine to kill a bear, even if the patient was technically dead the body would go right on thrashing and expelling organs afterward. Sometimes it was hard to tell when a patient was truly dead at all. On her car radio, evangelists railed that it was the end of the world.

Remy's first act had been to call her father to make sure he was all right. He was at his brother's in Des Moines.

She had lied and said that she was staying at a friend's house in California, everything was fine.

Bloody knees. She'd skinned them somewhere without even noticing. She couldn't feel when her mouth slipped open and she drooled, though the darkening spot on the front of her shirt seemed to indicate that was the case. The syringes were scattered all over the floor. She must have dropped them, though she couldn't remember when. People were going to catch on, and soon.

Against her shoulder, Cameron was crying quietly.


End file.
